(da hon kong extras)"Chi Lin Nunnery was first opened in 1934 but substantially rebuilt in a major project involving designers, architects and traditional craftsmen from China, Hong Kong and Japan, before being opened to the public in May 2000. Located at the foot of Diamond Hill in north Kowloon amidst high-rise apartment blocks and with a mountain backdrop the nunnery occupies a 30,000 square-metre site which provides a tranquil retreat from its urban surroundings. It is sheltered on the left by the Mountain of Compassionate Clouds and guarded on the right by Lion Rock. The nunnery is home to about 60 nuns. Since 2006 the nunnery has managed the adjacent Nan Lian Garden which it helped to design and fund. The nunnery is a large Buddhist monastic complex of fifteen magnificently crafted cedar halls, gardens, courtyards, gilded statues and lotus ponds and is modelled on the architectural style of the Tang Dynasty (618–907AD). A Buddhist monastery is metaphorically described as a forest - cong lin in Chinese - which comes from the Sanskrit word Sangha, meaning a large gathering of monks and nuns from ten directions. Together they resemble trees growing like a forest. The design follows the ancient rules of Chinese architecture and fung shui principles. In constructing the buildings no nails were used, instead traditional techniques of bracketing and dowels were employed to hold the timber structures together and only natural materials such as clay, stone and wood were used. The main halls, which are built on a north-south axis, face the sea and back on to the mountains with ancillary halls to the east and west."